Designing Tube Amplifiers (E-book)

Overview

This book focuses more on practical aspects than on theory, and it has an contemplative nature, as though the author were viewing amplifiers from above. Knowledge elements are integrated and placed in the context of a broad overview.

Overview

This book focuses more on practical aspects than on theory, and it has an contemplative nature, as though the author were viewing amplifiers from above. Knowledge elements are integrated and placed in the context of a broad overview.

Details

Even now tube amplifiers still sound great perhaps better than ever before. In part that is because we now have access to modern components such as toroidal output transformers, extremely high-quality resistors and capacitors, and many sorts of wire with good acoustic properties. Modern audio sources, such as CD players, and the latest top-end loudspeakers also enable us to appreciate how well tube amplifiers reproduce music even better than before.

This new book from Menno van der Veen looks at tube amplifiers from more than just a theoretical perspective. It focuses primarily on the design phase, where decisions must be taken with regard to the purpose and requirements of the amplifier, and it addresses the following questions: How do these aspects relate to subjective and objective criteria? Which circuits sound the best, and why? If you want to develop and market an amplifier, what problems should you expect? What are the significance and meaning of measurements? Are they still meaningful, or have they lost their relevance?

Thanks to the enormous processing power of computers, we can now measure more details than ever before. How can these new methods be applied to tube amplifiers? Previously it was sufficient to measure the frequency range, power and distortion of an amplifier in order to characterize the amplifier. Are these measurements still sufficient, or should we start measuring according to how we hear, using real music signals instead of waveforms from signal generators? The author sketches a future where amplifier measurements that conform to our sense of hearing enable us to arrive at new insights.

This book focuses more on practical aspects than on theory, and it has an contemplative nature, as though the author were viewing amplifiers from above. Knowledge elements are integrated and placed in the context of a broad overview.